A Mysterious Floppy Disk Icon

If a RISC OS 3.x machine’s CMOS configure option “Territory” is set to “2”, a large floppy disk icon is displayed immediately after powerup (or after a hard reset).
If one clicks ‘menu’ or ‘adjust’, or presses ‘Enter’, the machine continues to boot normally (except on RISC OS 3.0, where there seems to be no obvious way to escape it!).
I tried a bootable floppy in drive 0, assuming it would try and boot from that, but it doesn’t.
So, does anyone know the intended purpose of this ‘feature’?

Why would you set Territory to 2? Territory 2 is “Master”, not a real Territory.

does anyone know the intended purpose of this ‘feature’?

It is described on page 3-795 of the PRMs in some detail.

Or to be a little more helpful than pointing to the PRM – the standard version of RISC OS only contains messages and such for the default UK territory.
If you select a different terrority, then RISC OS looks a relevant Territory module in ROM.

If a relevant territory module is not present, it looks for for $.!Territory.Territory (the PRM is not particularly clear if this is literal – !Territory.Territory, or if the second Territory is replaced by the territory name (France, Germany, Japan, etc) which is a lot more logical (and should maybe have been italicised).

If this cannot be found, then a not-quite-Amiga-like floppy disc picture will appear and RISC OS will try to find adfs::0.$.!Territory.Territory. It will keep on prompting until it gets the desired territory. If you cancel, RISC OS will say “stuff it” and revert to the default UK territory.

As Sprow says, the PRM describes the process in detail. My post is just to tell you what is going on without necessitating a look at the PRM.

[RISC OS 3.70]

Thanks folks… yes I probably should have checked the PRMs(!).
Not something I’d ever seen before in 20+ years of using RISC OS.